There is more than one dick implicated in the Weiner scandal.

Having generally avoided paying attention to Democratic-Republican politics for the last few years due to my complete disillusionment with the liberal political machine, I had only a vague idea of who Anthony Weiner was last week when I sat down with Davetavius to watch the Dylan Ratigan Show and witnessed his whiny admission that he’d been sending pictures of his wang to women over the Internet and that he’d been having “inappropriate” conversations with several women on Facebook and Twitter.

The speech itself was pretty boring, save for the snicker Weiner managed to elicit from us when he claimed not to have been drinking when he elected to send pictures of his dick to someone he knew nothing about save that she hates “those damn repubs” and that she wants him to come to Las Vegas and “fuck the shit out of” her (yes, as hard as it might be to accept, there is a woman who says “fuck the shit out of”). Far more interesting was the commentary Ratigan and his guests offered before the speech on the absurdity of contemporary political culture and the news media’s complicity in allowing politicians to waste every single opportunity they are given to interact with the public on nonsensical grandstanding and offering trite and insulting opinions on whatever the scandal of the week happens to be. Ratigan cleverly refers to Democratic-Republican politics as “professional wrestling,” and also rightly opts to ignore it in favor of drawing attention to the problem that politicians from both parties get paid to avoid tackling: the capture of the entire US government apparatus by the banking, finance, medical, war, and prison industries. Unfortunately, Weiner elected to hold his press conference just after 4 PM on Monday, which is when Ratigan’s show starts, thus interrupting a worthwhile conversation with his submission to the already immense aggregated collection of histrionic and phony displays of contrition by public figures admitting to having used their penises in a non-approved manner.

What I did not discover until the end of the press conference was that Weiner was prompted to cop to sending the photo by Andrew Breitbart, who posted one photo on his website that Weiner had sent to a woman and claimed to have more. Andrew Breitbart, for those lucky enough to be unaware, is a conservative “journalist” — if one can refer to people who write for The Washington Times as “journalists” — who has recently published a book with the worst title I’ve ever heard: Righteous Indignation. The cover jacket lends the title an even headier air of stupidity, as the “right” in “righteous” and the “nation” in “indignation” are red, giving the book the secondary subtitle of “Right Nation” and indicating via use of color that Breitbart is both angry and sees the red states as the real American nation. The book’s actual subtitle, “Excuse Me While I Save the World!,” might display more unwarranted egotism and self-importance than “Right Nation,” but I can’t decide which one is dumber, and thus a better indicator of where the contemporary conservative movement is headed.

What an asshole.

I wouldn’t know who Breitbart was had I not seen Dylan Ratigan interview him — and even then I could scarcely pay attention because I lost the ability to be amused by conservative commentators years ago — but apparently he makes the claim that objectivity is a falsehood propagated by the “liberal media” in order to cloak its agenda in an air of factual empiricism, when in reality they approach current events with just as much bias as Rush Limbaugh or any other right-wing demagogue. The debate over whether there is such a thing as a “liberal media” is beyond hackneyed and boring at this point, but it is rather amusing to hear a conservative public “intellectual” question the existence of true objectivity. It sounds oddly reminiscent of, oh, I don’t know, let’s say post-modern liberal academics. That isn’t an accident. It’s a part of what Davetavius sees as a new trend among conservative commentators (which I’m sure he’ll write a post about sometime before 2013), which is to jettison the Glenn Beck-esque hysteria that has characterized conservative media since Obama’s election and replace it with a faux-intellectualism that will allow even the borderline-illiterate to feel like top shelf political analysts. Attacking the existence of objectivity may seem like a dangerous thing for a conservative to engage in, being that the insistence on the existence of objective truth is likely the most important epistemological tool at the disposal of those who benefit from the current global power structure, but it’s probably not. Anyone who would pick up, let alone purchase, a book called Righteous Indignation with a picture of a guy abortively attempting to affect skepticism on the front and pretending to yell on the back probably doesn’t possess the intellectual skills to process anything related to that idea. Breitbart knows that. He’s a cynical, self-aggrandizing asshole. Nothing to see here, move along.

But I had no idea. Later on Monday night, I saw video from the press conference taken before Weiner had arrived, in which Breitbart attempts to paint himself as a responsible journalist fighting for the cause of truth rather than a dishonest clown in a mad grab for attention that will help him to further his career. He essentially blackmailed Weiner into admitting to having sent out pictures of his dick to women on the Internet by threatening to release photos he only had in his possession in the first place because he sits around trolling progressives’ social media pages in the hopes that he’ll catch someone slipping and get hold of just such a piece of evidence that he can use to increase the number of seconds during which television viewers will have to endure his smug presence. He then demanded an apology from Weiner, thereby obliterating the possibility of anyone believing there was even an atom of truth in his claim to care about anything in relation to this story other than how famous it can make him. And that was before he went ahead and released the photos anyway, which amounts to sexual assault in my book. Breitbart, clearly, is a cretinous dick.

One can’t blame Republicans for so aggressively and ruthlessly exploiting Democratic politicians’ sex scandals. They’ve had so many of their own in the last few years that they jump at the chance to show that conservatives don’t hold perversion, sex abuse, and generally assholish sexual behavior in monopoly. And they’re right. Neither party holds an absolute monopoly on immoral or unethical sexual behavior, but one group does seem to have the market 99% or so cornered, at least in the world of politics: powerful men. Not that proof was lacking, but this incident is yet another piece of evidence that no matter how “liberal” men get, the last thing they will relinquish is their sexual doltism. Weiner was no radical, but he is one of an infinitesimal number of American politicians willing to take positions that are easily identifiable as socialistic and worry less about bipartisanship than rationality. Which is why this story, though it isn’t a surprise, does bum my party out.

Anthony Weiner, beloved by the kinds of people who have yet to realize that Bill Maher isn’t leading a revolution, supported extending Medicare to everyone rather than passing a health care bill that did no one but the insurance industry any good. His voting record indicates that he is a strong supporter of abortion rights. Add that to his penchant for publicly chiding Republicans, his friendship with Jon Stewart — who, though he may not be the most egregious promoter of Liberal Dudism, probably performs a more insidious role in its propagation than anyone else — and the fact that he represents a district that just happens to be the national epicenter of Urban Outfitters liberalism and it’s no wonder Weiner enjoyed a position at the top of the list of coolest Democrats among Tosh.0 viewers (an important category in my most recent scientific poll).

Lisa Weiss definitely loves Tosh 2.0. And is yet another dick in this already huge circus of dicks. Weiss, in a conversation with Weiner on the subject of Sharon Angle (R – NV):

if this wacko wins my state i swear i will have to move! she may be dumber than plain! and that is tough to find!

idiots i work with love this stupid b**ch!

Great. Another woman who shits on women in order to ingratiate herself with men. It may be incumbent upon me as a feminist to empathize with the ways in which women are forced to cope with the pressures we face living in a patriarchy, but I don’t think that ought to extend to condoning misogyny, even if it is directed at sellouts like Sarah Palin and Sharon Angle. And another thing: Weiner claimed at the press conference that all of his interactions with women online were consensual and took place between adults, but this woman sure expresses herself like an adolescent:

let’s kick some gop ass! i hate them!

when r you coming to vegas to help me beat up the right wing
crazies?

They begin talking about sex within one page of their recorded conversations. A month does elapse between the time she first contacted him in August and the September message in which he broaches the idea that they watch The Daily Show while having intercourse with him behind her (that’s right), so there might have been other IM conversations in the interim, but it’s clear that they went almost instantaneously from a cursory and shallow discussion of political party allegiance and Comedy Central programming to material explicit, unsubtle, and stupid enough to stand in for anything Chris Hansen has read back to a shame-faced redneck on To Catch a Predator. It’s “cock” this and “cum” that (probably the two least classy sexual terms of all time) from just about the second page on, with little else in between. Weiss’s behavior doesn’t even approach the nefariousness, dishonesty, and outright piggishness of Weiner’s, but she’s still a dick. In addition to calling other women stupid bitches, she also participated in sexual conversations with a married dude on the Internet, aggressively pushed for a real-life sexual encounter, and sent him a vaguely threatening message when the scandal began and she did not receive a response to her attempts to make contact with him:

u owe me big time for keeping this all quiet…i am defending u to the death on every blog and
to everyone….telling everyone u would never send dirty messages to women

And, of course, she went ahead and released their private conversations despite the fact that they make both of them look like crass, juvenile, oversexed idiots, which is proof that there is no limit to the humiliation people are willing to subject themselves to in order to get their name in the paper or their face on television (and, surely, a check).

Obviously, Wiener is the main dick in this scenario, in both senses. The exact circumstances surrounding the transmission of the wang shot elude me, but I gather from posts on the subject by other feminists that the dick photo Weiner sent to a woman named Gennette Cordova that begat this controversy in the first place was unsolicited and a total non sequitur. The mainstream media haven’t seemed to take note of that fact, but it’s a pretty big deal. It’s nearly impossible to avoid exposure to photos of wangs on Craigslist and dating sites, but even without visiting such sites and interacting with the men on them, most women have been duped into confronting an unsolicited dick photo at least a few times. You know what they used to call that before the Internet? Indecent exposure. Flashing. Men who exposed their genitals to women and girls who had not asked to see them were called perverts, people avoided men in trench coats, and the police arrested men who ran around sticking their dicks in everyone’s face. But the Internet has made flashing so easy for men that no one even takes notice of it anymore; it’s now such a common behavior that a US congressperson thinks it reasonable to send a photo of his penis to someone with whomhe had not had previous sexual conversations. Unsolicited dick shots are not the only means by which Weiner displayed a lack of respect for the emotional and sexual boundaries of the women he has been communicating with, however, as evidenced by these excerpts from his messages to Weiss:

you will gag on me before you c** with me in you

baby you’d be crawling for the door to prevent me from f***ing you silly

<= thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***

What kind of person wants their sex partner to gag while they’re being intimate? The proper human response to hearing one’s partner gag during sex — at least if one empathizes with their partner and considers them to be a human being — is to STOP DOING WHATEVER IS CAUSING THE GAGGING and concern oneself with making sure they are OK. The proper human response to seeing one’s partner “crawling for the door” is not to fuck them silly, it’s to have a word with oneself and ask what the fuck one might be doing to cause someone to attempt to escape. If someone is trying to escape from you and you continue to pursue sexual contact with that person, you are a rapist.

He also evinces a complete lack of understanding with regard to female anatomy and a total lack of concern for what the women he’s talking to might find arousing and pleasurable, probably because he can’t be torn away from worshiping his own dick long enough to think about it:

it won’t go away, and now I’m taking pics of it, making me ha**er still.

What you have just read, my dear readers, is a set of conversations that could never have occurred before the rise of porn culture and rape culture. Weiner takes almost no interest in Weiss, her (admittedly trite and poorly expressed) political views, her job as a card dealer, her friends, or anything else other than the orifices he wants to penetrate. He makes small talk, begins to flirt with the skill of a sixteen-year-old, and then moves right on to where he’s going to put his penis. He never asks her what might turn her on, but rather inundates her with information about the state of his penis, informing her of exactly what physical and emotional response she will have to it. That, the insipidness and lack of imagination that characterize his sexual fantasies, and his lack of consideration for Cordova’s boundaries or Weiss’s feelings about whether or not she’d like to be “gagged” during a sexual encounter hint to me that Mr. Weiner might just be a porn user. In porn, dicks reign supreme, and women pretend to fall all over themselves for the purported pleasure of gagging on and being aggressively penetrated by them. They aren’t interested in intimacy, whether emotional or physical, and they have no desires of their own that don’t align perfectly with those of men who are enthralled by nothing more than their own wangs. They’re perfectly happy to chat nonchalantly about the cable or a pizza, then begin blowing the cable or pizza delivery guy in the blink of an eye. Or they’re ready to go from expressing approval for the comedy of Stephen Colbert to hearing all about how they’re going to gag on someone’s penis. Weiss played along it seems, likely swayed by the foolish idea that being desired sexually (or, rather, used as the Internet equivalent of an uncompensated phone sex operator) by a congressperson is a big deal, but that clearly matters little as Weiner displayed the same behavior toward Cordova even though she didn’t engage in sexual conversations with him.

Were the mainstream media to miraculously up and decide to cover this issue responsibly and expend a modicum of effort analyzing what Weiner’s behavior says about our society and culture, this story might warrant some airtime. As it stands, it’s just another opportunity for the 24-hour news networks to flesh out their programming schedules and attempt to attract prurient viewership in order to sell shit and enrich their parent companies, and it’s just another opportunity for the two sides to engage in a bit of professional wrestling while everyone holds to the tacit agreement to deflect attention from economic and social reality, the devolution of which both parties perpetuate in between getting on television to pretend to care about whatever issues they think their constituents want them to care about.

Any shred of hope I might have had that someone in the media might decide to approach this scandal responsibly probably died as Weiner walked off stage after fielding questions and a reporter yelled one last question for him: “Were you fully erect in the photo?!” Because what we really need to know is how big this guy’s dick is, not why we live in a society where he could consider sending a stranger a picture of it in the first place.

31 thoughts on “There is more than one dick implicated in the Weiner scandal.”

It’s a little much to tag a post about Weiner as a post about “rapists” given the conversation he had with the woman from Vegas was encouraged by her. You are probably right to characterize his language as porn-y and her response as molded by sexist culture, but imitating a porn script with another person who enthusiastically participates is far from rape. Of much more concern and interest is the phenomenon you label “internet flashing.”

“Which is why this story, though it isn’t a surprise, does bum my party out.”

Do you identify yourself as a Democrat? I’ve always thought of you as a bit too radical to subscribe to either of the American parties who are, as you readily concede, in the pockets of the banking, insurance, and war industries. Or did I misunderstand that sentence?

I’m not a Democrat, but I was sorry to see one of the few people who would actually speak up for things like single payer health care rather than attempt to defend the DNC party line end up being this big of an asshole.

I want to talk to you. I have been obsessing over your blog the past couple days and it’s because I am finally accepting the fact that I am indeed, a feminist. I have never felt more in agreement with anyone else on any other topic in my life. I don’t really know why I must connect with you, nor do I know where to start, I just think you’re a genius. I didn’t see where I could send you an email, but maybe you could send me one sometime. I know you’re no therapist, but I need someone to talk to on the subject. I have been through a lot in my life and I need help coping in this world catered toward these creatures we call “men.”

This is quite possibly the best piece I’ve read chronicling this whole Anthony Weiner debacle. I hate how he had so many people fooled into believing he was a feminist ally. I hate how his politics ended where his rape-culture appetites began. I hate how right-wing pundits are using Weiner to make people forget about all the Republican politicians who have been caught in their own scandals, as if the right is some moral bastion of wonderfulness. Thank you for this post. Reading your work is always a real treat, even when the subject matter is not.

I’ve been vacillating between mortified sympathy for Weiner’s public humiliation and eye-rolling annoyance at what a reckless narcissist he is. Did you see the ABC interview with the single mom from Texas he was sending pictures to? She said he was constantly seeking affirmation of his sex appeal, which seems in keeping with the most recent gym photos that have come out. Who needs that many pictures of himself? I’m not even clear if she was sexting with him, but he did send her photos of his junk.

If he’s a self-sabotaging exhibitionist, well then, I suppose he’s earned congratulations.
But dammit can’t we at least have one politician in DC who’s willing to take on conflicts of interest in the Supreme Court?

What a fantastic post. I share the extreme frustration with the perverse dichotomy one finds in male leaders within movements for social justice, who at the same time behave like gender essentialists, expecting that the women will “naturally” be there to offer literal and metaphoric blow-jobs, fetch coffee and scrub the toilets.

@ gracemargaret –

Thanks SO MUCH for that link. It’s a great article and I expect, an important book that I cannot wait to read. Also a pretty interesting comment thread. (With its very own repetitive, dog-with-a-bone misogynist named “Andrew”. Coincidence?)

Very disheartening. The lack of analysis here is glaring. Maybe no one is alleging harassment or assault, but that might have something to do with how commonplace this kind of behavior is. A lot of women don’t report men for assaulting them, but that doesn’t mean nothing untoward has occurred.

I think people will be much less surprised all the time and much happier overall if they stop expecting politicians to actually do anything helpful.

Politics is not meant to be helpful. See, the past however many hundreds and thousands of years of politics. The government is never going to save you, or me, or any of us. Your vote is useless and nothing is ever going to change if you keep crossing your fingers and hoping, “This time, this one will be different!” He’s not. Your efforts are futile. You’re only going to elect another emotionally stunted sex addict who’ll spend his paid time literally and figuratively fucking around. Now get over it already and let’s all get on with this whole “revolution” thing.

(obviously not directed at ND, who doesn’t watch professional wrestling any more than I do [except sometimes for the LOLs].)

@Lizor
LOL. I thought the same thing when I saw the comments by Andrew in the thread. I was bracing myself for some nastiness in the comment section, when a woman challenges sexism it can get pretty ugly. I was (pleasantly) suprised by the civility and maturity in response to the article.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you have posted here, and can identify with it completely.

As a single woman, I have been exposed to more than my share of “dick pics” in recent history and can’t understand what makes a man think it is ok for him to inflict himself on me in this way, even when the conversation up until that point has been….well, conversational.

It makes me feel as if I am, as you said, just any number of orifices for that dick to be stuck into. Additionally, as you’ve said–there was a time when people were arrested for this type of behavior. Then again, there was a time when women were chastised for showing their ankles. These times, they are a-changin’.

I’m going to follow your blog. I like what I see here, and I think that by reading your words will help me to know that what I think is ok.

I agree with the other commenters — this is the very best rundown of this episode anywhere. But more than that, about the context and milieu of this and every other powerful-man-exposed-as-abusive-asshole event. Really, the last thing I wanted to read about this morning was more Weiner, but your excellent writing just compelled me on.

There is of course no way the MSM is going to do any analysis that might shed light on the fact that this kind of thing is going to keep happening specifically because of rape and porn culture. The next Weiner is out there in his abusive glory, it’s just a matter of chance whether we ever hear about it or not (DSK would have gone merrily along doing his raping and near-raping if the right elements hadn’t come together in this one event). What the boys in the newz and the blogz seem to be intent on is for no one to ever put all this together. Thanks for doing your part to connect the dots so the truth is unmistakeable to at least the people who might be part of a revolt against this kind of thing.

” “This time, this one will be different!” He’s not. Your efforts are futile. You’re only going to elect another emotionally stunted sex addict who’ll spend his paid time literally and figuratively fucking around. ” So true! I really need to question my own apparently blind faith that things may change for the better.

@gracemargaret: Yeah, funny hunh? But I was also pleased with the tone of the comments. Nice to see something heartening for a change.

See, when the early bits of this story came out, I made a decision to avoid hearing about it–I really didn’t care about a sexting scandal, because I don’t care about my politician’s sex lives in general. I made the assumption that the interactions were consensual, and so didn’t matter in the context of the larger political picture. And thus, I was mainly annoyed at Weiner for not coming clean on day one, simply stating, “Yes, that’s me. So what?” Sure, it was low-class, but I really would rather focus on actual issues.

Unfortunately, I now am faced with the fact that it was apparently NOT consensual–I agree that an unsolicited wang-shot to someone you’re not engaged in a sexual conversation with already is pretty much beyond the pale, and a manifestation of rape culture.

And sadly, that part is going to get completely overlooked by the mainstream media, which would rather talk about his penis. DAMMIT!

That said, thanks for doing what you can to bring up the issue of consent in all of this.

Excellent post. I agree fully that all parties involved were puerile, and that Wiener’s creepy, unsolicited cock shots and aggressive sexual dialogue are telling examples of how entrenched rape culture is in contemporary society.

Perhaps because I have too much experience with sexual aggression in my own life that I have become numb when the threat of actual physical harm is removed from the equation… but I have to admit I question whether his conduct is on par with flashing or sexually harassing a woman in person.

I agree wholeheartedly that his actions were wrong and not befitting of a public figure. And I am in full agreement that men sending pornographic pictures over the internet to random women is not OK.

It is more that, well, on the internet, I have never felt threatened by an image. I have the power to delete the image, navigate away from the webpage, or block the offender from contacting me. In this sense, I do not feel that it is an appropriate comparison.